Efficient Arabic Essay Scoring with Hybrid Models: Feature Selection, Data Optimization, and Performance Trade-Offs

Automated essay scoring (AES) systems have gained significant importance in educational settings, offering a scalable, efficient, and objective method for evaluating student essays. However, developing AES systems for Arabic poses distinct challenges due to the language’s complex morphology, diglossia, and the scarcity of annotated datasets. This paper presents a hybrid approach to Arabic AES by combining text-based, vector-based, and embedding-based similarity measures to improve essay scoring accuracy while minimizing the training data required. Using a large Arabic essay dataset categorized into thematic groups, the study conducted four experiments to evaluate the impact of feature selection, data size, and model performance. Experiment 1 established a baseline using a non-machine learning approach, selecting top-N correlated features to predict essay scores. The subsequent experiments employed 5-fold cross-validation. Experiment 2 showed that combining embedding-based, text-based, and vector-based features in a Random Forest (RF) model achieved an R² of 88.92% and an accuracy of 83.3% within a 0.5-point tolerance. Experiment 3 further refined the feature selection process, demonstrating that 19 correlated features yielded optimal results, improving R² to 88.95%. In Experiment 4, an optimal data efficiency training approach was introduced, where training data portions increased from 5% to 50%. The study found that using just 10% of the data achieved near-peak performance, with an R² of 85.49%, emphasizing an effective trade-off between performance and computational costs. These findings highlight the potential of the hybrid approach for developing scalable Arabic AES systems, especially in low-resource environments, addressing linguistic challenges while ensuring efficient data usage.